Godless Wednesday: Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

This week on Godless Wednesday we are commemorating the untimely passing of Christopher Hitchens, who has been the public face of godlessness for a decade at least.

Here's an excerpt of part of an obituary of Hitch from Slate magazine:

Born in Portsmouth, England, in 1949, Hitchens studied at Oxford before launching his journalism career in the 1970s with the magazines International Socialism and the New Statesman. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States, where he was a regular columnist at The Nation for two decades before parting ways with the liberal magazine after proudly disagreeing with its editors about the Iraq war.

Hitchens won the National Magazine Award for commentary in 2007, the same year that he became an American citizen on his 58th birthday. Foreign Policy named him to its list of the top 100 public intellectuals the following year, and Forbes magazine labeled him one of the 25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media in 2009, a distinction that took some by surprise given Hitchens's vocal support of George W. Bush's war on terror.

He was a frequent guest on news programs and at public debates, and rarely passed up the opportunity to defend his positions when given the opportunity to do so. He was the author of nearly 20 books, including God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and Arguably, a collection of his more recent essays that was published earlier this year.

Hitchens remained steadfast in his criticism of religion even in the face of his grim prognosis. In an August 2010 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, his colleague at The Atlantic, Hitchens made it known that even if he were to somehow recant his devout atheism on his deathbed, any apparent conversion would be a hollow gesture. "The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain," he said. "I can't guarantee that such an entity wouldn't make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark."

LGBT Icon Frank Kameny Dead At 86

Wow... Just days after my friend (and longtime lesbian activist) Paula Ettelbrick died, the LGBT community has lost one of it's wise elders: Frank Kameny, who was a gay rights pioneer, starting his activism in the 1950s.

The Washington Post covers Kameny's death thusly:

Mr. Kameny, a Harvard PhD whose homosexuality led to his discharge from a federal government job more than half a century ago, lived to see his years of determined advocacy rewarded by the success of many of his campaigns and by his ultimate welcome from a political establishment that had rejected him.

His death, apparently on National Coming Out Day, occurred in a year in which gay men and lesbians were accorded the right toserve openly in the armed forces, as David A. Catania (I-At Large), the D.C. Council’s first openly gay member, noted Tuesday night.

[...]

In what appeared to be one of the great triumphs of Mr. Kameny’s often lonely, uphill struggle, the protest signs that he once carried in front of the White House were put on display in the Smithsonian Institution four years ago, to be viewed along with the museum’s other reminders of the course of U.S. history. 

Mr. Kameny said he created the slogan “Gay Is Good.” In their pungent succinctness, the words both suggested his rhetorical skills and embodied the beliefs that he championed.

Years before the gay rights movement existed in any widely recognized form and in an era in which open assertion of homosexuality could invite physical harm, Mr. Kameny worked to increase the acceptance of gay men and lesbians in mainstream American society and to win recognition of their equality under the law.

Among the many advances Kameny is credited with working for and seeing come to fruition include: a public apology from the federal government in 2009 for firing him 50 years before; the repeal of the District of Columbia sodomy law; an executive order signed by President Clinton eliminating sexual orientation as a category for denying security clearances; an openly gay man appointed by President Obama as head of the Office of Personnel Management; and the founding of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations in the 1950s.

Longtime Lesbian Activist Paula Ettelbrick Has Died

Paula Ettelbrick held leadership positions at several important LGBT non-profits

I am saddened to report the news that longtime lesbian activist, Paula Ettlebrick, died of cancer-related causes at the age of 56 on October 7th. Ettelbrick was especially well-known in LGBT leadership circles. I knew her best as the Legal Director for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in the 1990s and later as the third Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesban Human Rights Commission (she was named a few years after I had left their Board of Directors in 2002).Most recently, Paula had been named the Executive Director of the Stonewall Community Foundation in New York City, resigning that position in August 2011.

Gay City News has some remembrances of Paula from fellow luminaries in the LGBT movement:

In a message distributed via email from Brazil on Friday morning, Cary Alan Johnson, who succeeded Ettelbrick at the helm of IGLHRC, wrote, “First and foremost I can say that I found her to be so genuinely, deeply, unfalteringly committed to our liberation as LGBT people. She also had a deep respect for all progressive movements and causes. Paula was one of the most sophisticated strategists I've ever met.”

In her work at IGLHRC, Ettelbrick strove with particular focus to educate American activists about the need to follow the lead of LGBTQ communities on the ground in countries where the group was seeking to provide support.

Rea Carey, executive director of the Task Force, wrote, “I will truly miss Paula — her sass, her smarts, and her smile. She was supportive of me and of other women in leadership positions. In fact, upon becoming the executive director of the Task Force, I received a note card from her along with a contribution to the Task Force in honor of women’s leadership.”

Sue Hyde, who directs the Task Force’s annual Creating Change conference, wrote that Ettelbrick’s “story is incomplete without calling forward her inspiring and visionary work as a community organizer par excellence.” It was Ettelbrick, Hyde said, who pioneered efforts to increase the representation of LGBT Americans in the US Census, at a time “when to do so was regarded as quixotic.”

Calling her “a great hero,” Ross Levi, ESPA’s executive director, noted that as the group’s general counsel, Ettelbrick took the lead in negotiating provisions of the city’s 1997 domestic partnership law with Mayor Rudy Giuliani. At the time that law was enacted, it was the most comprehensive package of such benefits in the US.

Kate Kendall, who heads up NCLR, said, “Paula was possessed of singular intelligence, integrity, ferocity, and wit. She was also unfailingly generous and open-hearted. She will be missed as a tireless advocate of the most disenfranchised.”

Kevin Cathcart, Lambda Legal’s executive director, recalled, “When Paula Ettelbrick came to Lambda Legal 25 years ago to fight for the rights of gay men and lesbians, it took not only vision and a passion for justice –– it also took courage to stand up in court and in the public eye during that earlier time in our history. Paula was fearless.”

In her work at Lambda, NCLR, the Pride Agenda, and the Task Force, Ettelbrick aggressively maintained that the fight to expand rights and protections for gay and lesbian couples and families must benefit as broad a definition of family as possible. In 1993, in a collection edited by William Rubenstein titled “Lesbian, Gay Men and the Law,” Ettelbrick wrote an essay “Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?” that spelled out a feminist critique of how the institution had historically constrained the freedom and rights of women. The community, she argued, should be pressing for social and legal changes to support alternative family structures truer to the reality of queer lives.

I have used Paula's essay as a text in my Race, Gender and Justice class for years and had last seen her at the Williams Institute's Global Arc of Justice conference at UCLA in 2009. I also know her ex, Suzanne Goldberg, well, (who is another luminary in the LGBT rights movement). She is survived by her partner Marianne Haggerty and her son and daughter Adam and Julia.

Paula will be sorely missed. Many people are commemorating her by commenting on her Facebook page: